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At some time or another, you may have heard the saying, "Jack of all trades and master of none." This lack of success, according to marketers, is often avoided by locating a niche.

By avoiding the temptation to sell everything like a peddler, you can successfully concentrate on one niche in a market.

Niche marketing is especially effective on the internet, where billions of products and services are sold.

This approach allows you to favourably position yourself in a unique manner to a specific market.

Even though you may be a small online business, this doesn't necessarily mean you'll end up with a measly profit. Au contraire, a small business can pull in as much revenue as a larger online operation as long as the smaller business is attracting the right market.

The recipe
The recipe for building a profitable niche is to first identify an un-met need and then fill it.

Even if you have great faith in your service or product, you first have to find out if a market for this business exists. But, finding an open niche is no easy task since over 50 billion websites currently sell tonnes of services and products.

Instead, you need to look for unique ways to present a niche. This slight change in approach may make a world of difference.

You can also start your hunt for a niche by first listing your expertise. From this list, you may discover a new way to position or spin your expertise so you'll stand out from all the competition.

All too often a great niche is handled poorly or abandoned on the internet.

When you come across this, you should first research what caused this failure before you launch into the niche. Begin the research by testing keywords on the internet. List keywords and synonyms that are closely tied to this niche and test these in search engines. Study the search results and note the listings on those results.

Follow through to study the listing sites to see if these sites look old or deserted. Try to guess why these sites failed or are failing. Has the niche lost its appeal to its market or was the site poorly constructed and run?

When you discover a gap inside a niche site that isn't well represented, ask yourself if you could fill that gap in a way that would interest your market?

Many of these gaps are found inside customer service. Could you offer that service better than your competitors can?

Another type of gap involves keywords.

Sometimes website owners overlook keywords that are frequently used by their market.

You can mine for these keywords yourself by testing keywords in Google and studying the results or by using a free software such as Google Keywords by Softnik Technology to find out how many searches per month are requested for certain keywords along with the number of results that appear.

When your niche is completed saturated or presented very well, then you should consider picking a different niche.

To enter that saturated niche often means you'll need millions of dollars in order to compete or a level of expertise that takes a long time to accomplish.

For example, why enter Amazon's niche unless you have lots of money to invest and the manpower to make the effort worthwhile?